Greetings,

For several years, I have used the wonderful Cantata as a frontend to MPD. Sadly, the frontend stopped receiving updates in 2022 and has started to some problems with age. While I continue to use Cantata for as long as I can, I have been looking around at other music players. However, I haven’t seen anything that aims to implement some of the nice things from Cantata.

In short, a few things I have been looking for in a player:

  • suitable for playing single songs, albums, full artists, custom mixes, or playlists (no hyperfocus)
  • can either set a custom artist sort tag (albumartist, composer, etc.) or properly handle semicolons (or some other separator char) in tags
  • semicolon tag split in general would be nice for genre handling
  • powerful active queue handling (move; shuffle and sort by song, album, artist; remove duplicates; consume on play; etc)
  • online lyrics search from multiple providers

Additionally, some nice-to-haves that Cantata handles:

  • CD ripping
  • export library to portable device (with compatibility)

Anyone have a favorite that can handle at least the shortlist of functionality I come to expect? I don’t expect specifically a frontend for MPD, but I would prefer a player that doesn’t struggle to handle a library with 104 magnitude library size.

  • Ms. Falcon
    1•3 days ago

    i thought of using strawberry or clementine actually, usually i use either qmmp, audacious (both qmmp and audacious are actually nice to use for me because of the fact winamp skins are somehow supported and i found it cool) and more recently rhythmbox though i looked through and wanted to try other music or video (or both) players out of curiosity… in your opinion (or the person reading this’ own opinion) how good is either strawberry or clementine and which is better (assuming since strawberry is a fork, i thought it would have more stuff in it or stuff that does it better compared to clementine)

    • @Kissaki@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1•3 days ago

      I’ve always used aimp2, but my library broke file path metadata and the fixup tool fails to relocate them. I’ve looked at FOSS and free alternatives, and am not really, fully satisfied with any of them.

      IIRC, I found none of them sufficient. Strawberry, Clementine, Audacious, MusicBee; all have dissatisfactory UI / UI structure for me. Foobar is way too minimal. From my exploration, MusicBee was the most reasonable, acceptable for me. The customizable tab setup is a confusing mess too, but otherwise… I’ve been using that for a while.

      At some point I started implementing my own music player, making use of the BASS library like aimp2 does. But not much has come of that [yet?].

      Maybe I can recover my aimp2 metadata, and will switch back to that.